DAVID FRENCH: Marry Young? Marry Old? Marry When You Have the Character to Marry. “You’re old enough to marry when you possess enough wisdom, character, and emotional maturity to recognize that you are no longer the center of the universe, and you can and should love another person more than you love yourself. There are 16-year-olds who understand this, and there are 60-year-olds who do not. But in this era of ever-longer childhoods (for some people, 24 is their grandfather’s 14), many of us are delaying the most basic elements of emotional maturity well past previous generations.”